The Archived (20 page)

I think of the box of Ben’s things, overturned on my bed, my hands shaking as I picked
up each item and prayed there would be a glimpse, a fractured moment, anything. Clinging
to a silly pair of plastic glasses with nothing more than a single, smudged memory.

“I’ll keep an eye out,” I say, and Owen pulls me into a hug. I flinch but feel nothing,
only steady quiet.

“Thank you,” he whispers against my ear, and my face flushes as his lips graze my
skin. And then his arms slide away, taking the quiet and the touch, and he retreats
into the alcove, the darkness swallowing everything but his silvery hair. I force
myself to turn away, and hunt.

As nice as his touch was, it’s not what lingers with me while I work. It’s his words.
Two words I tried to shut out, but they cling to me.

What if
echoes in my head as I hunt.

What if
haunts me through the Narrows.

What if
follows me home.

I
 
PEER OUT
the Narrows door and into the hall, making sure the coast is clear before I step
through the wall and back onto the third floor of the Coronado, sliding my ring on.
I got the list down to two names before it shot back up to four. Whatever technical
difficulty the Archive is experiencing, I hope they fix it soon. I am a horrible hollow
kind of tired; all I want is quiet and rest.

There is a mirror across from me, and I check my reflection in it before heading home.
Despite the bone-deep fatigue and the growing fear and frustration, I look…fine. Da
always said he’d teach me to play cards. Said I’d take the bank, the way things never
reach my eyes. There should be something—a tell, a crease between my eyes, or a tightness
in my jaw.

I’m too good at this.

Behind my reflection I see the painting of the sea, slanting as if the waves crashing
on the rocks have hit with enough force to tip the picture. I turn and straighten
it. The frame makes a faint rattling sound when I do. Everything in this place seems
to be falling apart.

I return home to 3F, but when I step through the door, I stop, eyes widening.

I’m braced for vacant rooms and scrounging through a pile of takeout flyers for dinner.
I’m not braced for this. The moving boxes have been broken down and stacked in one
corner beside several trash bags of packing material, but other than that, the apartment
looks strikingly like, well, an apartment. The furniture has been assembled and arranged,
Dad is stirring something on the stove, a book open on the counter. He pauses and
pulls a pen from behind his ear to make a margin note. Mom is sitting at the kitchen
table surrounded by enough paint swatches to suggest that she thoroughly raided that
aisle of the home improvement store.

“Oh, hi, Mac!” she says, looking up from the chips.

“I thought you already painted.”

“We started to,” says Dad, making another note in his book.

Mom shakes her head, begins to stack the chips. “It’s just wasn’t quite right, you
know? It has to be right. Just right.”

“Lyndsey called,” says Dad.

“How was Wes?” asks Mom.

“Fine. He’s helping me with the
Inferno
.”

“Is that what they call it?”

“Dad!”

Mom frowns. “Didn’t you have it with you when you left?”

I look down at my empty hands, and rack my brain. Where did I leave it? The garden?
The study? Nix’s place? The roof? No, I didn’t have it on the roof—

“Told you they weren’t reading,” whispers Dad.

“He has…character,” adds Mom.

“You should see Mac around him. I swear I saw a smile!”

“Are you actually cooking?” I ask.

“Don’t sound so surprised.”

“Mac, what do you think of this green?”

“Food’s up.”

I carry plates to the table, trying to figure out why my chest hurts. And somewhere
between pouring a glass of water and taking a bite of stir-fry, I realize why. Because
this—the banter and the joking and the food—this is what normal families do. Mom isn’t
smiling too hard, and Dad isn’t running away.

This is normal. Comfortable.

This is us moving on.

Without Ben.

My brother left a hole, and it’s starting to close. And when it does, he’ll be gone.
Really and truly gone. Isn’t this what I wanted? For my parents to stop running? For
my family to heal? But what if I’m not ready to let Ben go?

“You okay?” asks Dad. I realize I’ve stopped with the fork halfway to my mouth. I
open my mouth to say the three small words that will shatter everything.
I miss Ben.

“Mackenzie?” asks Mom, the smile sliding from her face.

I blink. I can’t do it.

“Sorry,” I say. “I was just thinking.…”

Think think think.

Mom and Dad watch me. My mind stumbles through lies until I find the right one. I
smile, even though it feels like a grimace. “Could we make cookies after dinner?”

Mom’s brows peak, but she nods. “Of course.” She twirls her fork. “What sort?”

“Oatmeal raisin. The chewy kind.”

When the cookies are in the oven, I call Lyndsey back. I slip into my room and let
her talk. She tunes her guitar and rambles about her parents and the boy at the gym.
Somewhere between her description of her new music tutor and her lament over her mother’s
attempt to diet, I stop her.

“Hey, Lynds.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve been thinking. About Ben. A lot.”

Oddly enough, we never talk about Ben. By some silent understanding he’s always been
off-limits. But I can’t help it.

“Yeah?” she asks. I hear the hollow thud of the guitar being set aside. “I think about
him all the time. I was babysitting a kid the other night, and he insisted on drawing
with a green crayon. Wouldn’t use anything else. And I thought about Ben and his love
of blue pencils, and it made me smile and ache at the same time.”

My eyes burn. I reach out for blue stuffed bear, the pair of black glasses still perched
on its nose.

“But you know,” says Lyndsey, “it kind of feels like he’s not gone, because I see
him in everything.”

“I think I’m starting to forget him,” I whisper.

“Nah, you’re not.” She sounds so certain.

“How do you know?”

“If you mean a few little things—the exact sound of his voice, the shade of his hair,
then okay, yeah. You’re going to forget. But Ben isn’t those things, you know? He’s
your brother. He’s made up of every moment in his life. You’ll never forget all of
that.”

“Are you taking a philosophy course too?” I manage. She laughs. I laugh, a hollow
echo of hers.

“So,” she says, turning up the cheer, “how’s Guyliner?”

I dream of Ben again.

Stretched out on his stomach on my bedroom floor, drawing with a blue pencil right
on the hardwood, twisting the drops of blood into monsters with dull eyes. I come
in, and he looks up. His eyes are black, but as I watch, the blackness begins to draw
inward until it’s nothing but a dot in the center of his bright brown eyes.

He opens his mouth to speak, but he only gets halfway through saying “I won’t slip”
before his voice fades away. And then his eyes fade, dissolving into air. And then
his whole face fades. His body begins to fade, as if an invisible hand is erasing
him, inch by inch.

I reach out, but by the time I touch his shoulder, he’s only a vague shape.

An outline.

A sketch.

And then nothing.

I sit up in the dark.

I rest my head against my knees. It doesn’t help. The tightness in my chest goes deeper
than air. I snatch the glasses from the bear’s nose and reach for the memory, watching
it loop three or four times, but the faded impression of a Ben-like shape only makes
it worse, only reminds me how much I’m forgetting. I pull on my jeans and boots, and
shove the list in my pocket without even looking at the names.

I know this is a bad idea, a horrible idea, but as I make my way through the apartment,
down the hall, into the Narrows, I pray that Roland is behind the desk. I step into
the Archive, hoping for his red Chucks, but instead I find a pair of black leather
boots, the heels kicked up on the desk before the doors, which are now closed. The
girl has a notebook in her lap and a pen tucked behind her ear, along with a sweep
of sandy blond hair, impossibly streaked with sun.

“Miss Bishop,” says Carmen. “How can I help you?”

“Is Roland here?” I ask.

She frowns. “Sorry, he’s busy. I’m afraid I’ll have to do.”

“I wanted to see my brother.”

Her boots slide off the desk and land on the floor. Her green eyes look sad. “This
isn’t a cemetery, Miss Bishop.” It feels weird for someone so young to refer to me
this way.

“I know that,” I say carefully, trying to pick my angle. “I was just hoping…”

Carmen takes the pen from behind her ear and sets it in the book to mark her place,
then puts the book aside and interlaces her fingers on top of the desk. Each motion
is smooth, methodical.

“Sometimes Roland lets me see him.”

A faint crease forms between her eyes. “I know. But that doesn’t make it right. I
think you should—”

“Please,” I say. “There’s nothing of him left in my world. I just want to sit by his
shelf.”

After several long moments, she picks up a pad of paper and makes a note. We wait
in silence, which is good, because I can barely hear over my pulse. And then the doors
behind her open, and a short, thin Librarian strides through.

“I need a break,” says Carmen, rolling her neck. The Librarian—Elliot, I remember—nods
obediently and takes a seat. Carmen holds her hand toward the doors, and I pass through
into the atrium. She follows and tugs them shut behind her.

We make our way through the room and down the sixth wing.

“What would you have done,” she asks, “if I’d said no?”

I shrug. “I guess I would have gone home.”

We cross through a courtyard. “I don’t believe that.”

“I don’t believe you would have said no.”

“Why’s that?” she asks.

“Your eyes are sad,” I say, “even when you smile.”

Her expression wavers. “I may be a Librarian, Miss Bishop, but we have people we miss,
too. People we want back. It can be hard to be so far from the living, and so close
to the dead.”

I’ve never heard a Librarian talk that way. It’s like light shining through armor.
We start up a short set of wooden stairs.

“Why did you take this job?” I ask. “It doesn’t make sense. You’re so young—”

“It was an honor to be promoted,” she says, but the words have a hollow ring. I can
see her drawing back into herself, into her role.

“Who did you lose?” I ask.

Carmen flashes a smile that is at once dazzling and sad. “I’m a Librarian, Miss Bishop.
I’ve lost everyone.”

Before I can say anything, she opens the door to the large reading room with the red
rug and the corner chairs, and leads me to the wall of cabinets on the far side. I
reach out and run my fingers over the name.

BISHOP, BENJAMIN GEORGE

I just want to see him. That’s all. I
need
to see him. I press my hand flat against the face of the drawer, and I can almost
feel the pull of him. The need. Is this the way the Histories feel, trapped in the
Narrows with only the desperate sense that something vital is beyond the doors, that
if they could just get out—

“Is there anything else, Miss Bishop?” Carmen asks carefully.

“Could I see him?” I ask quietly. “Just for a moment?”

She hesitates. And to my surprise, she steps up to the shelves and produces the same
key she used to disable Jackson Lerner. Gold and sharp and without teeth, but when
she slides it into the slot on Ben’s drawer and turns, there is a soft click within
the wall. The drawer opens an inch, and sits ajar. Something in me tightens.

“I’ll give you a few minutes,” Carmen whispers, “but no more.”

I nod, unable to take my eyes off the sliver of space between the front of the drawer
and the rest of the stacks, a strip of deep shadow. I listen to the sound of Carmen’s
withdrawing steps. And then I reach out, wrap my fingers over the edge, and slide
my brother’s drawer open.

I
’M SITTING ON THE SWINGS
in our backyard, rocking from heel to toe, heel to toe, while you pick slivers of
wood off the frame.


“You can’t tell anyone,” you say. “Not your parents. Not your friends. Not Ben.”


“Why not?”


“People aren’t smart when it comes to the dead.”


“I don’t understand.”


“If you told someone that there was a place where their mother, or their brother,
or their daughter, still existed
—
in some form
—
they’d tear the world apart to get there.”


You chew a toothpick.


“No matter what people say, they’d do anything.”


“How do you know?”


“Because I’d do it. Trust me, you’d do it too.”


“I wouldn’t.”


“Maybe not anymore, because you know what a History is. And you know I’d never forgive
you if you tried to wake one up. But if you weren’t a Keeper
…
if you lost someone and you thought they were gone forever, and then you learned you
could get them back, you’d be there with the rest of them, clawing at the walls to
get through.”


My chest turns to stone when I see him, crushing my lungs and my heart.

Benjamin lies on the shelf, still as he was beneath the hospital sheet. But there’s
no sheet now, and his skin isn’t bruised or blue. He’s got the slightest flush in
his cheeks, as if he’s sleeping, and he’s wearing the same clothes he had on that
day, before they got ruined. Grass-stained jeans and his favorite black-and-red-striped
shirt, a gift from Da the summer he died, an emblematic X over the heart because Ben
always used to say “cross my heart” so solemnly. I was with him when Da gave it to
him. Ben wore it for days until it smelled foul and we had to drag it off of him to
be washed. It doesn’t smell like anything now. His hands are at his sides, which looks
wrong because he used to sleep on his side with both fists crammed under the pillow;
but this way I can see the black pen doodle on the back of his left hand, the one
I drew that morning, of me.

“Hi, Ben,” I whisper.

I want to reach out, to touch him, but my hand won’t move. I can’t will my fingers
to leave my side. And then that same dangerous thought whispers into the recesses
of my mind, at the weak points.

If Owen can wake without slipping, why not Ben?

What if some Histories don’t slip?

It’s fear and anger and restlessness that make them wake up. But Ben was never afraid
or angry or restless. So would he even wake? Maybe Histories who wouldn’t wake wouldn’t
slip if they did…
But
Owen woke,
a voice warns. Unless a Librarian woke him and tried to alter his memories. Maybe
that’s the trick. Maybe Owen isn’t slipping because he didn’t wake himself up.

I look down at Ben’s body and try to remember that this isn’t my brother.

It was easier to believe when I couldn’t see him.

My chest aches, but I don’t feel like crying. Ben’s dark lashes rest against his cheeks,
his hair curling across his forehead. When I see that hair tracing its way across
his skin, my body unfreezes, my hand drifting up to brush it from his face, the way
I used to do.

That’s all I mean to do.

But when my fingers graze his skin, Ben’s eyes float open.